PTR: "New" Devouring Plague

New PTR note is out, and a change for DP, here goes:

"Devouring Plague initial damage has no base damage anymore and just scales based on spellpower, rather than a base plus a lower amount of spellpower. The DoT component damage has been reduced by 40%."

Any1 knows what this means in numbers? is this a buff/nerf?

would fucking hate it being another nerf, since we are allready bottom of the food chain in dps pve singel target scenarios.

Its a miniscule nerf from live... DP losing a mere 5500 damage at around 25000 spellpower. Whereas with the 20% MB buff, you're gaining about 14k damage on each one.
Personally, I liked the previous version of the PTR DP better. Though, if blizz really wanted to buff our burst, they could make the upfront damage scale with mastery.

My Twitter Feed: FlayerInTheMist***Visit me over in Vitaris!***
Blackmorgrim#1728 (H2P:<H2P username> in msg box)
"People are not persuaded by what we say but rather by what they understand." - Fortune cookie

Its a miniscule nerf from live... DP losing a mere 5500 damage at around 25000 spellpower. Whereas with the 20% MB buff, you're gaining about 14k damage on each one.
Personally, I liked the previous version of the PTR DP better. Though, if blizz really wanted to buff our burst, they could make the upfront damage scale with mastery.

I'm not up-to-date about all those PTR changes, but i've looked at the changelog and I don't see that +20%
dmg on MB anywhere. What did I miss?

He tweets saying DP is a bad area to nerf, reverts it then nerfs it again. :S

I am lost.

Remember damage numbers aren't finalized. What it looks like is an attempt to fix PvP initial burst while still attempting to let PvE have it as a burst. Not exactly sure how it'll work out till towards the end of PTR as numbers get more finalized. The reason they wanted to nerf DP first on PTR was because the initial burst for PvP was rather hefty (with PvP Power) and would rather lower that than other abilities in PvP. By making it scale better with SP instead of SP/PvP Power it allows for the burst to be a little bit lower in PvP and the burst in PvE higher when using it.

Except it's not. Different abilities scale with differently with spell power, where as every ability scales with PvP power in the exact same way. This means, changing the percentage with which an ability scales with spell power has a greater effect on PvE than on PvP. In this case they are greatly buffing the scaling, which is gonna show up as more of an increase in PvE than PvP. At the same time, the flat damage component has been removed, which has a flat effect on PvE, but a scalable effect on PvP.

Nothing worth having comes easy. That's why hard content is worth doing, and easy content is a waste of time.

Except it's not. Different abilities scale with differently with spell power, where as every ability scales with PvP power in the exact same way. This means, changing the percentage with which an ability scales with spell power has a greater effect on PvE than on PvP. In this case they are greatly buffing the scaling, which is gonna show up as more of an increase in PvE than PvP. At the same time, the flat damage component has been removed, which has a flat effect on PvE, but a scalable effect on PvP.

Live is currently 78.3% (and 13.1% on the dot) spellpower scaling (vs 78.6% and 13% on ptr), so this is a slight nerf over live (when you factor in the loss of base damage), even in PvE.

Remember damage numbers aren't finalized. What it looks like is an attempt to fix PvP initial burst while still attempting to let PvE have it as a burst. Not exactly sure how it'll work out till towards the end of PTR as numbers get more finalized. The reason they wanted to nerf DP first on PTR was because the initial burst for PvP was rather hefty (with PvP Power) and would rather lower that than other abilities in PvP. By making it scale better with SP instead of SP/PvP Power it allows for the burst to be a little bit lower in PvP and the burst in PvE higher when using it.

Hopefully that's the intended goal though.

Devouring plague in pvp is the predictable burst though, you could even make addons to track the enemys mind blasts and therefore orbs.

random procs like 5 MS/MB procs fired off in a row isnt predictable and is a large fault in the spec.